All hail the Peacemakers 21

American lawmakers have summoned a British security consultant to probe Israel’s role in alleged Russian interference with the 2016 election, which has been the subject of a two-year long FBI investigation.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is seeking an interview with Walter Soriano, director of London-based security firm USG Security, to discuss what, if any, role Israel may have played in attempts to manipulate the 2016 election.

The committee, which oversees the work of the US Intelligence Community, sent a letter to Soriano for a voluntary, closed-door interview to discuss documents dating back to June 2015. The letter obtained by Politico, is said to be more than just a “fishing expedition”. The committee members are said to be keen on getting a deeper insight into the role other countries may have played in hacking US elections. It’s believed that they are interested in speaking with Soriano because of his connections to high profile people.

Democratic senators introduced a resolution on Thursday in support of a two-state solution and against Israeli annexation of any parts of the West Bank.

The resolution doesn't mention Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by name, but is a direct rebuke to his election promise from April that he will annex parts of the West Bank if he forms Israel's next government.

Among the senators who signed the resolution are two presidential contenders, Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The resolution was crafted by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and signed by Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Tammy Duckworth, from Illinois, and Dick Durbin, also from Illinois.

If Trump’s ill-fated “deal of the century” to achieve Middle East peace ever existed, it never stood a chance against the blunders that emerge when each of its three architects – Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his bankruptcy lawyer turned U.S. Ambassador David Friedman, and his real estate lawyer Jason Greenblatt — opens his mouth.

Greenblatt has made a habit of tweeting about the “open minded” Palestinian businessmen – though there is just one Palestinian Uncle Tom known to date — who are willing to accept the Trump team’s economic bribes in exchange for our people’s right to self-determination.

On June 6, five Democratic Senators introduced a resolution denouncing Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign pledge to annex the West Bank. Two of those Senators, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, are currently running for the Democratic nomination for president.

The resolution was introduced by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley. In addition to Warren and Sanders, he was also joined by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

The Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday ordered the eviction of a Palestinian family from the Silwan neighborhood outside Jerusalem's Old city, dismissing their appeal and ruling in favor of the right-wing Elad Association, a settler organization that owns the majority of the building. The ruling brings to an end a nearly 30-year legal battle over the property. Elad’s victory also has symbolic value because the evicted people are relatives of Jawad Siyam, a social worker and community activist who is considered a leader among Silwan’s Palestinians. After his family leaves their apartment and adjacent storefront, Siyam and his brothers will have to share the building with the settlers.

ast week, J Street U, the campus arm of J Street, wrapped up its inaugural free trip to Israel for Jewish college students. The “Let My People Know” trip was conceived as a response to protests against Birthright, which does not include meetings with Palestinians on its trips, or discussions about the occupation.

While the debate around Birthright has received significant national attention, there are some Israel tours for college students that are going unnoticed. These trips are led by organizations with explicit right-wing political agendas that have a dangerous potential to affect young US Jews’ understanding of Israel and the occupation in the years to come.

NETANYA, Israel — What stings most is not that he was arrested at 15, that his crime was speaking up for a younger boy, that he was one more Ethiopian harassed by the Israeli police, or even that he was pummeled by the police officer on the way to the station house.

The one memory that Izra Ayalo, 25, cannot shake was the moment when the officer told a commander, “Watch this,” and raised his fist again.

JERUSALEM — Israeli bulldozers arrived before dawn on Monday and began clawing at the first of 10 Palestinian apartment blocks that were slated for demolition because the government said they were illegally built too close to its security barrier in a Palestinian area of the West Bank abutting Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.

Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and public security, Gilad Erdan, said in a statement that the government had gone ahead with the “demolition of the illegal and mostly uninhabited buildings” after an Israeli court ruled that they constituted “a severe security threat and can provide cover to suicide bombers and other terrorists hiding among civilian population.”

The New York Times had to report Israel’s shocking demolition yesterday of Palestinian apartment blocks in Jerusalem; the story was too big to ignore. But the paper’s Isabel Kershner cleverly tried to present Israel’s brutal action in the best possible way, while muffling the voices of the victims.

Contrasting the Times’s coverage with other reports, including an excellent article by Mondoweiss’s Yumna Patel, reveals just how biased Kershner’s effort is.

Israel has begun rounding up scores of Filipino workers and their Israel-born children for deportation, prompting large-scale protests outside the prime minister’s residence and at the country’s Ben Gurion Airport.

After Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority last month handed scores of Filipino workers and their children deportation papers, requiring them to leave the country within weeks, Israeli authorities have now begun rounding up families and transporting them to detention centers.

Throughout history, demagogues have used state power to target minority communities and political enemies, often culminating in state violence. Today, we face that threat in our own country, where the president of the United States is using the influence of our highest office to mount racist attacks on communities across the land. In recent weeks, he has lashed out unprompted against four freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and me, from Minnesota.

Last week, as President Trump watched the crowd at one of his rallies chant “Send her back,” aimed at me and my family, I was reminded of times when such fearmongering was allowed to flourish. I also couldn’t help but remember the horrors of civil war in Somalia that my family and I escaped, the America we expected to find and the one we actually experienced.

JERUSALEM — In a matter of months, a campaign to boycott Israel has moved from the margins of politics — liberal college campuses and protest marches — to Congress, where the freshman representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan have become its most vocal backers, drawing fire from the White House.

On Tuesday, the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the campaign, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. With its adherents prominent in the British Labour Party and critics fighting it in Washington and dozens of state capitals, B.D.S. has become a proxy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States and Europe, with all the emotion the conflict stirs.

If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel.

“They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself responded to the controversy by declaring that Omar “hates Israel.”

This is strange. As reprehensible as it is to demand that an American politician leave America for allegedly expressing insufficient patriotism, the demand is at least familiar.

“America, love it or leave it,” has been a conservative slogan since the 1960s. What’s virtually unprecedented is demanding that an American politician leave America because they’ve expressed insufficient devotion to a foreign country. Can anyone imagine Republicans defending Trump’s calls for expelling Omar and company by accusing them of hating Canada, India or Japan?

Of course not. The reason is that Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country. They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: An ethnic democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state. Trump and many of his allies want America to be a white, Judeo-Christian state. Israel, despite its free elections and parliamentary institutions, structurally privileges one ethnic and religious group over others. That’s what many Republicans want here.

In the press, commentators often overlook the right’s affinity for ethnic democracy in favor of other explanations for GOP support of Israel. But those other explanations are at best incomplete. One common argument is that Republicans love Israel because of its commitment to democracy and human rights.

But in the Trump era, democracy and human rights are not Republican foreign policy priorities. It’s not just Trump who admires authoritarian leaders. Rank and file Republicans do too. They hold a more favorable view than Democrats of both Russia and Saudi Arabia. And when The Economist and YouGov asked Americans last December whether “Human rights abuses should be a principal concern in our dealings with countries,” Republicans were only half as likely as Democrats to say yes.

Most Republicans also want Israel to rule the West Bank, where Palestinians live under military law without the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. If you support Israel’s undemocratic control of the West Bank, democracy is probably not the reason you support Israel.

Aiming to expose and loosen the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. campuses, Palestinian-born professor Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi has sued San Francisco State University (SFSU) in federal court for illegal retaliation for her political speech, and in state court for breach of contract and employment discrimination. Her supporters have issued a call for donations to a fund to cover necessary expenses of the litigation.

Speaking to supporters on a conference call, Behnam (Ben) Gharagozli, one of Abdulhadi’s lawyers, said the case “will send a positive message to everyone engaged in campus activism and in researching, teaching and speaking up for justice in/for Palestine. It will change the dynamics at universities across America where people will no longer have to be afraid of criticizing Israel.”

Gharagozli’s co-counsel Mark Kleiman explained, “We will expose how the Israel lobby operates. Controlling campus debate is important to them. That is why the lobby pays for university presidents to take trips to Israel. This case will reveal their excess influence, which is part of the general trend of powerful interests taking over U.S. academia.”

An IDF disciplinary body sentenced 18-year-old Israeli conscientious objector Maya Brand-Feigenbaum to 20 days in military prison on Tuesday over her refusal to serve in the military.

This is the second time Brand-Feigenbaum, from the northern town of Tivon, has been sentenced for refusing to serve since she her conscription date on July 14. Upon completing her sentence, will have spent a total of 27 days behind bars. Military conscription is mandatory for most Jewish Israelis

After a two year legal battle, a group of students at Fordham University have won a landmark victory and a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) club can now be established on their campus.

In December 2016, the school vetoed the Student Government’s approval of SJP, but in April 2017 the students sued the university for violating its own rules with the the Center for Constitutional Rights, Palestine Legal, and cooperating counsel Alan Levine representing them. Today the Supreme Court of New York annulled the school’s decision. In her ruling, Justice Nancy Bannon wrote that Fordham’s “disapproval of SJP was made in large part because the subject of SJP’s criticism is the State of Israel, rather than some other nation, in spite of the fact that SJP advocates only legal, nonviolent tactics aimed at changing Israel’s policies.”

An Israeli soldier’s body has been found with multiple stab wounds near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank in what the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called a “terrorist” attack.

The incident, which occurred between Bethlehem and the flashpoint city of Hebron in the West Bank on Thursday, sparked a manhunt by security forces and risked heightening Israeli-Palestinian tensions weeks ahead of Israeli polls on 17 September.

“Today in the early morning hours, a soldier’s body was found with stabbing marks on it adjacent to a [Jewish] community north of Hebron,” Israel’s army said in a statement. It did not elaborate on the circumstances or confirm whether the soldier was in uniform at the time.